2 days ago
More funding will not improve Britain's utterly incompetent police
One of the major factors contributing towards the growing sense of decay in Britain's public realm – what some have started to call 'scuzz' – is successive governments trying to cook the Treasury's books by running national policy through councils by stealth.
Most voters doubtless assume, not least because politicians continue to pretend, that their council tax is about paying for things like bin collections, road repairs, and urban beautification, all of which have been cut and cut again over recent years.
But in reality, many councils spend up to 70 per cent or more of their budgets servicing policies, such as social care and services for children with special needs, which are set in Whitehall.
Yesterday's spending review was another case in point. Rachel Reeves announced an increase, albeit one that police chiefs think will be woefully inadequate. But dig into the details, and it becomes clear she expects that to come in large part from increases in council tax.
It's a cunning setup, in low political terms. Voters will see their taxes going up – but who can they blame? Their local authority, in the first instance, rather than the Chancellor. Perhaps their local police and crime commissioner too, if they know that PCCs get to set an additional policing 'precept' on council tax bills.
The diffusion of authority makes it harder for people to hold anyone accountable, either for the increase or for the state of policing. When PCCs were introduced by the Conservatives, the idea was that they would help to increase scrutiny of the police by replacing anonymous boards with a single, elected individual who could champion the public interest.
Yet public awareness of the posts is so low (turnout in PCC elections is invariably risible) that this seldom happens in practice. Whilst some PCCs have been more effective than others, as a whole they have done little to halt or even slow the growing alienation between voters and police forces which seem, too often, to have very different priorities.
Last year, analysis by the Daily Telegraph found that, years after the shocking stat was first reported, it is still the case that in almost half the country the police solve literally zero burglaries – a fact which sits very uncomfortably next to high-profile reports of sending six officers to arrest two parents for complaining about their child's primary school on WhatsApp.
And whenever there is serious public disorder, there is almost always a gulf between the swift and muscular response overwhelmingly favoured by voters when polled and the hands-off, softly-softly strategies employed by police chiefs. Ultimately, it's one more thing for the Conservatives to learn, from their most recent period in government, how not to do it.
Driving change in the culture of the police is certainly possible. New Labour did it, and after 14 years of Tory-led government we are still living with the forces they forged. But it takes active pressure from the top, not farming the job out to minor functionaries nobody has heard of.
In the meantime, and as with so much else in Britain, we're going to be stuck footing a bigger and bigger bill for a state which works less and less well.
